Appendix 3: Important To Point Out
You can speak of the structure of the solar system even though it changes with time. This is
important to understand when I refer to sizes of the Moon and the planets, and their orbital
distances.
The whole object of developing a theory for the way planetary systems form is that they meet the
following criterion: They predict the Titius-Bode rule for the distribution of the planets; the
distribution gives the planetary orbital periods from Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation. The
distribution of the planets is chiefly predicted by three factors: The inward forces of gravity from
the parent star, the outward pressure gradient from the stellar production of radiation, and the
outward inertial forces as a cloud collapses into a flat disc around the central star. These forces
separate the flat disc into rings, agglomerations of material, each ring from which a different
planet forms at its central distance from the star (it has a thickness). In a theory of planetary
formation from a primordial disc, it should predict the Titius-Bode rule for the distribution of
planets today, which was the distribution of the rings from which the planets formed.
Also, the Earth has been in the habitable zone since 4 billion years ago when it was at 0.9 AU.
Today it is at 1AU, and that habitable zone can continue to 1.2 AU. So we can speak of the
distance to the Earth over much time. The Earth and Sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago. As
the Sun very slowly loses mass over millions of years as it burns fuel doing fusion, the Earth slips
microscopically further out in its orbit over long periods of time. The Earth orbit increases by
about 0.015 meters per year. The Sun only loses 0.00007% of its mass annually. The Earth is at
1AU=1.496E11m. We have 0.015m/1.496E11m/AU=1.00267E-13AU. So,
The Earth will only move out one ten thousandth of an AU in a billion years. Anatomically
modern humans have only been around for about three hundred thousand years. Civilization
began only about six thousand years ago.
The unit of a second becomes important in my theory. We got the second from the rotation
period of the Earth at the time the moon came to perfectly eclipse the Sun. The Moon slows the
Earth rotation and this in turn expands the Moon’s orbit, so it is getting larger, the Earth loses
energy to the Moon. The Earth day gets longer by 0.0067 hours per million years, and the
Moon’s orbit gets 3.78 cm larger per year.
That is as the Earth’s day gets longer and the lunar orbit grows larger, we got the second at the
time that the Earth day was what it is during the epoch when the Moon perfectly eclipses the
Sun, 24 hours.
The near perfect eclipse is a mystery in the sense that it came to happen when anatomically
modern humans arrived on the scene, even before that, perhaps around Homo Erectus and the
beginning of the Stone Age. The Earth day was 18 hours long, long before that, 1.4 billion years
ago. Homo Erectus is around two to three million years ago.